Margaret Keyser Consulting

Margaret’s 23 year career in conflict transformation and reconciliation took shape in her native South Africa. She was a student leader in the anti-apartheid struggle at the University of the Western Cape, where she was the first woman to qualify for ordination at its theological school. She then went on to do conflict transformation work at the grassroots level to help prepare ordinary citizens for a new South Africa. The work involved training, organizing, facilitating and mediating conflicts among groups, communities, diverse institutions including churches, schools, and workplaces. She continued to help local communities in the Western Cape embrace the Truth and Reconciliation process called forth by Nelson Mandela as a necessary means to save their nation at a decisive moment in its history, a process that brought people to the place of forgiving their enemies, even those who brutally killed family members, by coming to discover their own humanity in theirs.

In 1998 Margaret brought these experiences and skills to the United States where over the past 18 years she worked in several cities and states, and applied them effectively to transform conflict-ridden situations in schools, government agencies, trade unions, churches, etc., always adapting them to the particular circumstances and cultural contexts involved. She worked in the following capacities: as Executive Director of the Center for Conflict Transformation in Hartford, Connecticut, for which she received an award for her leadership in establishing this organization; as adjunct professor at Hartford Seminary, Director of Training with Plowshares Institute, an international Peace building Institute, and more recently as Executive Director of the Greater Hartford Interfaith Coalition for Equity and Justice. (See formal biography here)